By Isaac White

Copyright newsbusters

CNN’s Inside Politics with Dana Bash
September 15, 2025
12:04:10 p.m. Eastern

DANA BASH: Manu, it’s just—I think I’ve had a lot of people asking me, you know, “What does this mean?” and, “What’s happening with our political leaders?” And I think Peter Baker of The New York Times, and others, really kind of nailed it over the weekend by—and I want you to weigh in on this as well—that Donald Trump is not constitutionally, small c, set up to ratchet down the pressure. It’s not who he is. It’s not who he ever was. He is somebody who—whose instinct is to do just the opposite. That’s just on the politics. And then if you work in the fact that he is, as Kristen said, very upset, mourning somebody who was very close to him, it’s making for a cocktail of something that we haven’t seen with regard to presidential leadership. Certainly in our lifetime.

MANU RAJU: His response to crises depends on the moment, depends on the person that’s happened to. And it’s been basically, if it’s a Republican or someone who is aligned with him, he has a much different response than if it’s a Democrat. Sometimes he doesn’t respond to that at all. And you’re right, he does not—he’s not a consoler-in-chief. There’s the way George W. Bush handled post-9/11, saying, “Islam is not a religion of war, it’s a religion of peace.” Trying to ratchet down anger towards Islam. And there’s Trump directing the blame at the left, even before we even knew who the suspect was, he was doing just that. It’s—that’s who he is.

You know, the question is, you know—we are in a moment, really, of time where we’re seeing violence play out across the political spectrum. I mean, there were two Minnesota lawmakers who were targeted, one sadly assassinated at her home with her husband this year. Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, had his house burned down. We didn’t hear much from the President when that happened. A totally different response this time.

ALAYNA TREENE: Yeah, I mean, and I think the point as well is rarely have we ever seen an administration—and not just the President, but all of his top aides, the Vice President included—act or react to a moment like this in such a deeply personal way. And that’s what I think to me has been so striking to see the way that they—you know, he ordered flags to be flown at half-mast, he is going to honor Charlie Kirk posthumously with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I mean, these are things that are a very different response to what we’ve seen in other cases like this.

I think part of it, too—and the one thing that I really do want to get answers on, the White House has not been clear in my questions on this—is what he means when he says, ‘We’re going to go after these leftist organizations.’ I mean, obviously, that-that quote that Kristen referenced of the President saying, that is not unifying rhetoric.

But we did get a little bit of clarity, I think—and this is what my, what White House officials are telling me in my conversations with them—is look at what Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said last week, which was essentially, this could be baked in into a broader anti-crime crackdown that they are working on, particularly as it relates to violent crime. But no one has any answers on what that actually means or what that could look like.

BASH: Yeah. So there’s that. And then there are voices that are notable in the Republican Party because they are voices—maybe solos, not a chorus—like the governor of Utah, who on Friday at the press conference when they were talking about the investigation, took a moment to discuss and plead with people to calm down the rhetoric. Steve Bannon took issue with that. Yesterday, I interviewed Governor Cox and got him to react to Steve Bannon basically attacking Cox for trying to lower the temperature.

12:08:23 p.m.

HANS NICHOLS: You’re seeing voices of calm throughout the Republican Party. Speaker Mike Johnson has been sort of leading on this, asking people to take a beat.

BASH: That’s fair. True. That’s true.

NICHOLS: The challenge for Johnson and for leaders in the Republican Party is that their rank and file, in some cases, get pretty angry, and they are expressing some of this anger. So every time a leader sort of asks to tamp things down and cool, they sort of let passions cool a little bit, there’s another member that will come off and say something that’s a little bit more on the inflammatory side. And that’s really a challenge for the Congressional leaders at this moment.

They’re also dealing with very practical concerns that Senators and lawmakers have about their own security. And I suspect we’ll see a lot of that this week, as members are wondering what kind of funds they can use to protect themselves and how they can keep themselves safe. And that’s a bipartisan issue.

BASH: So there is, you know, the idea of fighting crime combined with—there’s so many different factors and layers of this moment that we’re in—combined with the fact that Charlie Kirk had enormous reach, particularly with young people. I mean, you saw this weekend major sporting events take the time to pay tribute to Charlie Kirk, which is not something you even sometimes see for Presidents or elected officials. Never mind somebody who is a well-known conservative activist. And then there are the people who, not just online, but in the White House, Stephen Miller in particular, who has been very forward-leaning about the fact that they want to go after political enemies because of this.

Chris Murphy, Democrat from Connecticut, posted this, “Pay attention. Something dark might be coming. The murder of Charlie Kirk could have united Americans to confront political violence. Instead, Trump and his anti-democratic radicals look to be readying a campaign to destroy dissent.” And what are we talking about here, Manu?

We’re talking about if you look really anywhere on any of your social media platforms, you are going to see examples of conservatives making lists of people who, maybe are just everyday Americans, some who are working for schools or for local governments, who—there’s a spectrum of people who reacted in a cheering way to Charlie Kirk. There are some who are clearly just, completely out of bounds. Saying anything positive about the murder of a 31 year old man is disgusting. And then there are those who just posted their feelings about it, and maybe it wasn’t that disgusting.

But look at what Reuters is reporting. And they did a review of screenshots and comments posted to a site which is compiling all of these. Again, some featured jokes, some featured celebrations. Others were just critical of the far-right figure and explicitly denouncing violence. But this is something that—this is kind of what Chris Murphy is talking about. And the question is, where does that lead us?

RAJU: Well look, I mean, this has been the pattern of this second term of the Trump administration, is to go after their critics to try to tamp down on dissent. And those comments from Stephen Miller in the wake of all this were pretty striking. I mean, he was going after one group after another, targeting, I believe, George Soros and the like as well, of course, who’s a big Democratic donor. So it’s very clear that the concerns that Chris Murphy’s voicing is that will they use this as a pretext to go even further in that retribution campaign? And Stephen Miller’s comments suggest that they will.

You know, just to the point, though, I mean, you can be, you know, there is a lot of anger, as Hans [Nichols] was saying, from the rank and file from the GOP. But, you know, a test of leadership to try to tamp down that anger and try to say that, “Look, violence happens on both sides, on the right and on the left. And none of it is good. We should stop it.” All of that. And that is just simply not the message from the White House.

BASH: And I just want to just use just facts here about some examples of violence that happened against those on the left. One we’ve talked about a lot which is, and you just mentioned, the murder of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband. Senator Mike Lee, put up something on social media, “Nightmare on Waltz Street.” “Waltz” referring to the Governor of Minnesota. Now, was he celebrating the murder of a Democratic lawmaker? No, but he was mocking it. This is a sitting United States Senator from Utah. It took him a long time, he finally did delete it he was got complaints from his colleagues from Minnesota.

Paul Pelosi was doing nothing except sleeping in his bed, and he was almost killed by somebody in a politically violent act with a hammer in his home. Afterwards, we saw a lot of Republicans, again, not cheering it necessarily, but mocking it. Don Jr. had a post up for a week that had—you can just look at it now, “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.” What do they say about this at the White House, Alayna?

TREENE: Look, I mean, clearly what we’re hearing from the President, I think a lot of officials are trying to take their cues from him. They’re trying to paint this as if it’s only violence on the left, which is clearly just not true. And I think to Hans’ point and to what you all are saying about the anger among rank and file, there’s so much anger in the White House. It was very quick. I remember the day that the shooting happened, in my conversations with people in the White House, there was that shock. There was that disbelief, the grief. It very quickly turned to, “I’m angry. We need to hold people accountable, and there needs to be some reckoning here.” And that is where the messaging is going. This idea that they need to target left-wing organizations, as the President is saying.

Now, of course, when they see these images, they note, “Yes, there is violence on both sides.” But they are trying to kind of repaint the narrative that it’s mostly on the left, which again, is just not true.

BASH: Yeah. And again, I think that we need to say, again, we understand they’re angry. They have every right to be angry and to be mourning and to be sad. We just we have to get information about—more information about who this person is, and it’s still an open question about culturally where we are right now with all this.